Isn’t This a Long One?

gardening, humans and wildlife, precipitation, rodents, trees and plants, weather, wildlife encounters8 Comments

January last seems impossibly distant. Memories from back then are round-edged and worn, like relics of a lost civilization. The pandemic was dawning, of course, although few of us in this country had a clue what was to come. Lockdowns, masks, grimly mounting death tolls? Other people’s burdens, far away. I was more concerned with…

Slender-Tube Skyrocket

summer, trees and plants, wildflowers

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I discovered, in researching this post, that the common names “Skyrocket” and “Gilia” refer to more than one species of plant. The genus name (as I’ve recently learned) is Ipomopsis. You’ll often see populations of Scarlet Gilia as red spikes jutting out of the bare dirt of road cuts…